Bear spotted in the Lower Engadine

A young brown bear observed in the Lower Engadine and shortly afterwards fatally struck by a Rhaetian Railway train: a tragic chronicle.

Editorial team Wild beim Wild — 5 April 2016

Update: 9.4.2016 The bear was run over by a train.

Once again, a brown bear has not survived the journey into Graubünden. A young animal first spotted a week ago was struck head-on by a train in the Engadine in the early hours of Saturday and killed instantly.

The Graubünden Office for Hunting and Fishing announced on Saturday that the collision between the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) locomotive and the predator had occurred late on Friday evening shortly after 11 p.m. between Zernez and S-chanf. It was the last train running that night.

The bear killed in the accident was a juvenile weighing 110 kilograms. The University of Bern is examining the carcass and conducting genetic analyses to determine its identity. The locomotive was not damaged in the collision.

Second collision with a locomotive

The presumed immigrant from northern Italy had first been spotted last Sunday by a private individual in the Lower Engadine. The brown bear — initial suspicions pointed to M32 — had been roaming the valley throughout the week.

He had been moving quickly and was exploring his new habitat, said Graubünden's hunting inspector Georg Brosi when asked. The wildlife wardens had sighted the animal on Friday, just shortly before its death.

This is not the first collision between an immigrant bear and an RhB locomotive in Graubünden. In May 2012, bear M13 was injured in the Lower Engadine when it collided with the locomotive of the late train from Scuol to Klosters. The bear sustained bruising in the collision.

The animal ultimately did not survive its excursion into Graubünden. In February 2013, the three-year-old male was shot by wildlife wardens in the Poschiavo valley. The bear had repeatedly appeared on the valley floor and had frightened tourists and locals.

First visit in half a year

The still-unidentified brown bear killed in the train accident on Friday evening — possibly M32 — was the 13th immigrant to Graubünden since the summer of 2005. It is also the third animal to pay with its life for venturing into Switzerland.

Before brown bear M13, wildlife wardens shot bear JJ3 in mid-April 2008. The animal had repeatedly roamed inhabited areas in search of food after emerging from hibernation and had, in the view of the hunting authorities, become a risk to people. The bear was then shot in the Thusis region.

Unique images of the bear in the Münstertal

In the night leading into Monday, 4 April 2016, a bear was observed in the Lower Engadine.

It crossed the cantonal road coming from the Inn. The sighting is considered credible. Already at the end of last week, a bear had been observed in the area of the Reschen Pass in South Tyrol, moving northward. This could be the male M32, which had previously left traces in the Val Müstair area over an extended period.

M32 would be the 13th bear to have migrated from Italy to Graubünden. He is likely to have emerged from hibernation about a month and a half ago.

If it is indeed M32, the animal is two and a half years old, as Hannes Jenny, wildlife biologist at the Office for Hunting and Fisheries, said when asked. The bear is rather shy and last autumn and this spring had specialised in “beekeeping items.”

This is the first sighting in the Lower Engadine since September 2015.